As long as: 1. You want to keep your money in it for a longer time AND 2. You buy on a pullback AND 3. The fluctuation's general direction is upward that is not a problem. I know, that is a lot of ANDs, but look at BTC in 2017.
I wonder how regulators are even going to cope? They'll have to ban private coins, but it will do as much as banning online piracy, though at that point... What do you trade for it in the "legal" world? Ah nevermind.... Use "underground" or foreign exchanges for legitimate coins.
Crypto fans downplay the ban, but just imagine if you can not buy anything legally online (let's say at least in the USA and EU) with cryptos. Sure those alpaca socks look nice from Peru, but what else is good your "currency" at that point? Also, any loses/robberies will get a cold shoulder from authorities, because it won't be recognized as value lost. Not to mention your laptop could be taken away at a border if any kind of crypto software is found on it. If cryptos are currencies, then their main purpose is for being used as an exchange of value. A ban would stop that very quickly.
This is how the value of your money when invested in bitcoins and compared to invested in CHF. Pictures tell more then 1000 words. Where would you put your savings?
A ban on bitcoin by the USG would be devastating. I experienced the US ban on online poker. At the present time, a US ban on bitcoin is very unlikely in my opinion. The recent developments suggest a path to more regulations legalizing the use of bitcoin and to be able to track the users and investors. I read that it took the CME and CBOE about a year to get through the hurdles to be able to trade bitcoin futures. They would not spend the time and money for something that would get banned. Circle (a company backed by Goldman Sachs among others) recently acquired Poloniex, one of the largest cryptocurrencies exchange. There was a leak of a confidential memo in which Circle was communicating with the SEC and FINRA with positive feedback coming from the regulators. There are other big businesses that generate a lot of profits (i.e. Coinbase, Bitpay, Gemini) that are also in compliance with US regulations. All of these things point to legalization of bitcoin in the US, not the opposite. Monero may get banned by the USG which means trading Monero for fiat or bitcoin would need to be done outside of the US
Bitcoin is just like diamonds. Oh wait!: http://www.scmp.com/business/compan...ts-fakes-technology-chinas-lab-grown-diamonds "The spread of synthetic diamonds in China, originally designed for industrial purposes such as oil drilling, is posing such a threat to the global diamond market that it has forced dominant player De Beers to invest tens of millions of dollars on methods to identify the man-made stones that look exactly like the real thing." It is an excellent example because beside diamonds not being rare, now we can have cheap copycat diamonds and those are: 1. By look you can't tell the difference. 2. For industrial usage they are the same. So tell me again, what is so unique about diamonds?
The tendency for cryptos to become easier and easier to use, making it increasingly wide spread(and more stabel) will make a ban on them just as effective as the drug ban. The difference is that people willing to use currency is effectively EVERYONE, unlike the number of people who want to use drugs, but despite that, anyone who wants access to drugs, has it. Given that, the failure in enforcing the ban on cryptos will be even more pathetic. A ban would initially be actually in effect in large established business, but as the market is always reinventing itself, new, smaller, non-regulated business that deal with cryptos(despite the ban) would gradually and increasingly gain competitiveness. This is in fact another benefit of cryptos, they would serve as a way to get around stupid and protectionist regulations that only benefit the already established business. And again, an effect such as this will be so widepread, that enforcing regulations would be impossible. In face of this, regulators will be forced to do what they did with uber: bend over and back off. This is what in the end will force the bigger companies to join in: the need to stay competitive. These changes won't happen overnight, but at least they will be the way it is supposed to be in a descentralized/free market: from the bottom to the upper part of the economy, because if it is the other way around, things would only get worse. In a nutshell, once the control freaks lose their ability to control(which was guaranteed essentialy through the monopoly of money), their incompetence will be their death sentence.
I get that it's easy to lose perspective when you're around a bunch of smart, tech savvy people all the time. The reality of the world, however, is that 98% of the population isn't smart or tech savvy. A shockingly large number of people in the U.S. still write checks to pay for things and don't really know how to use basic stuff like email. Cryptocurrency is a niche thing used by a tiny fraction of a percent of the world's population. There is no benefit to 99% of the world's population to switch that will be readily apparent to them, and switching cost is relatively high given the level of technical savvy of the majority of the world's population. So no, the world is never going to switch to using cryptocurrency, just not realistic.
When I said "their" I was obviously referring to the conventional currencies that we are using right now like GBP or AUD because I was just talking about them in the previous sentence.